Most people tend to think of image stabilization as being mainly for telephoto lenses. While it's true that their longer focal lengths tend to magnify the effects of camera shake, image stabilization can provde a very useful assist at wider angle focal lengths as well; anyone who's ever tried to blur the image of a waterfall, while keeping the surrounding landsape tack-sharp knows exactly what I'm talking about.
Sony claims that the E 50mm ƒ/1.8 OSS offers (approximately) 4 stops of shutter speed advantage, but we would put the actual performance at somewhere around 2 1/2 stops: with OSS disabled, 90% of our images shot at 1/60s were sharp, which under the "one over shutter speed" rule of thumb is about what you would expect. With OSS enabled, we got consistently excellent images at a shutter speed of 1/15s, which is two stops better than 1/60s; at 1/8s, only half of our images were excellently sharp.
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| Mouse over this chart to show results with IS activated. |
IS systems tend to provide more benefit to less-stable shooters than very steady ones, so most users will see the same or greater amounts of shake reduction as we measured here. You can read more about our IS test methodology here: SLRgear IS Test Methodology, v2.
